Privacy will be considered a luxury in 2025: experts

Today's notions of privacy will be eroded significantly within the next decade as growing reams of personal data are willingly exchanged for the convenience of living our lives online.

That's the prevailing view among the more than 2500 industry experts from around the world - including academics, legislators and staff at global companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - who were quizzed on the future of privacy and security.

Respondents to the study from the Pew Research Center in the US, in conjunction with North Carolina's Elon University, said they believed living a public life online would be the new default by 2025.

They variously predicted current notions of privacy would soon become "quaint", "archaic", a "fetish" and "the new taboo" - something that future generations would fail to understand, let alone appreciate.

"Everyone will expect to be tracked and monitored, since the advantages, in terms of convenience, safety, and services, will be so great," Google chief economist Hal Varian wrote in his response.

Optimistically, one policy co-ordinator believed internet organisations would reach an international consensus on how best to balance privacy and security with popular content and services.

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However, many more foresaw a backlash against the evolving social norms.

One respondent, who wished to remain anonymous, predicted more people would engage in acts of civil disobedience by choosing to "opt out" of online services, rather than be tracked by companies.

Others believed new tools would be created to give citizens greater agency over what information they shared, and with whom.

Some saw encryption tools, which can be used to hide personal information and files, becoming more widely used.

However, researcher Kate Crawford said such service providers would be likely to seek commercial benefit, resulting in the creation of privacy as a "luxury good", and a new social divide of "privacy rich" and "privacy poor".

Companies the world over are investing more and more in "big data" and "data mining", which allows them to trawl through customer data to better tailor and market their products and business.

Professor Michael Fraser, director of the Communications Law Centre at the University of Sydney, said that while individuals legally consented to companies storing their data when signing up to online services, it was not necessarily informed consent.

"Facebook, Google and others, their entire value comes from the exploitation of our personal, private information," he said.

Professor Fraser also warned of the link between the private sector's collection of customer data and government agencies' ability to access such data, saying it was effectively government surveillance by proxy.

In 2013, Australian authorities made more requests to access user data from major technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple than any other country except the US, according to "transparency reports" published by the companies.

Legislative changes recently increased the powers of Australia's top spy agencies, with a plan to force telcos to retain customer metadata for up to two years still in the pipeline.

Professor Fraser said privacy law reform was needed to protect citizens' personal data as a property right.

Many respondents to the Pew survey were sceptical whether the push for such protections would succeed in the face of large corporate interests and lobby groups.

The study was part of a broader internet research project by the Pew Research Center to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.